I Love Big Brother

Breaking the law is harder in my latest hometown, where the traffic lights sprout a new crop of cameras every spring. It’s a seasonal ritual around here: the cops give notice, our local paper prints angry letters, and when the clamor fades there’s another eye watching me.

It’s not worth waving at or worrying about. Any twelve-year-old shoplifter could tell you that.

I snap a picture and move on.

What can the intelligence behind the lens tell you about me? At a certain timestamp, I parked a red Hyundai at the intersection of Franklin and Broadway. I stepped out to snap a picture, then continued driving towards the Thruway.

Nothing I wouldn’t tell you.

I see a lot of privacy concerns in letters to the Editor, but not on Livejournal, Flickr, or any of the other forums we’ve erected. We use pseudonyms as a buffer against the most casual of stalkers, but fake names are empty gestures when attached to the libraries of personal data, images, and confessions we throw up on the web. What good is it to withdraw your name but not where you live, pictures of your house, kids, stomping grounds, and friends? Or even, perhaps, of the fun times we had demonstrating against those surveillance cameras?

Being watched doesn’t bother us. We fucking love it. Folks who plaster their faces, affairs, and food neurosis all over the screens of complete strangers can’t convince me it’s lost privacy they fear from Panopticon. If anything, Big Brother starts to sound like the nation’s automated Flickr account.

Actually being private, unobserved and entirely unknown, scares people more than a little. So why spill ink over police cameras on light posts? It can’t be that the technology has potential for misuse- that same argument is dismissed out of hand when applied to technology we like, as with file sharing, the Internet, or pocket knives.

In the age of cell phone cameras and obsessive autobiography, why don’t we love Big Brother?

The subtext of our contemporary ‘privacy concerns’ is, we want to get away with stuff. Maybe I have to piss, and it’s the alley or my pants. I want to smoke my bimonthly joint in peace. I want to watch a ripped screener before buying the DVD so I don’t waste my money on shitty media. Speeding isn’t necessarily reckless, so fuck forty-five.

Every law presents four choices: obey it, ignore it, change it, or leave town. When behavior we accept morally is deemed illegal, our frequent response is to break the law quietly and often. Privacy simplifies this: we break the law in private, obey it in public. So when the cameras go up and we have ourselves a good shout on it, are we really just peeved that committing our private, petty crimes is a notch more complex? That surveillance can compel us to obey when we’d reserve option to ignore?

Listen, friends: there’s nothing holy about the law of the land, but it’s a fact until we vote otherwise. Their mandate is to catch you, yours to slip past. It’s a dance old as law and it’s just your turn.

Sit down if you can’t dodge a couple cameras.

If drunks, muggers, and assholes can’t figure out not to abuse their fellow citizens in front of my city’s surveillance network, I’m not shedding a tear. Those of us who behave morally towards our fellows and retain some measure of self-control have little to fear. No one’s getting dragged to 101 for wearing the wrong buttons in front of a police camera, and if the American Experiment comes to such a dystopian turn it won’t be the camera’s fault. Don’t blame the jackboot if you voted for the bastard wearing it.

Second to dickheads, the ones with the most to fear from Panopticon are cops. (Our cameras far outnumber theirs.)

“I kind of hesitate about it,” said a local cop I spoke to in the early stages of a quite different article. We were sipping coffee in front of a gas station and talking about beating the shit out of people, a part of the job very few cops enjoy. “Even if I think the individual is hostile, or he may be on something, I still have to hold back. We escalate very carefully.”

Rules of engagement?

“Well, yeah. But I could be one-hundred-ten percent right to use force and still get fired if it ends up on the news. Look at that guy in Chicago.”

Charitably, I’m assuming that the officer doesn’t mention Anthony Abbate as someone whose righteous use of force went sour under the camera. Abbate is, in addition to a bad cop, an instant Panopticon celebrity. Surveillance footage of him beating the blood and snot out of a female bartender half his size attracted millions of eyes through YouTube, Google, even Fox (for Christ’s sake).

Everybody knows what Anthony Abbate is made of. Thanks, Big Brother.

And with the eyes of the world on Chicago’s handling of the case, things are changing. Officers who helped block the media from Abbate’s perp walk (something of a tradition, in the case of arrested officers) were demoted. Chicago’s Chief is sharpening the ax, and anyone still following the case in a month or two is in for a steaming platter of heads.

Call this one Abbate’s Law: the action taken against a bad cop varies directly as the number of people who watch them fuck up. This ties into the real beauty of Panopticon in our media-hungry times, in that the more flagrantly awful the act, the more people just have to see it.

And tell everyone they know.

Cell phone cameras gave us Abu Ghraib. Commercial CCTV gave us Abbate. And if something truly, spectacularly terrible is caught on the stoplight cameras of my latest hometown, I’m dead certain to find it on YouTube within the month. Whether from private, personal, or state-owned cameras, the truth will claw itself out.

Feel sorry for the police, in at least one respect. While millions swap links to the latest ‘cops gone wild’, few but the police are watching the daily grind of street crime and reckless drivers, locking up the knuckleheads to keep the rest of us safe.

We’re all on notice in the Panopticon, but simultaneously we are empowered. Remember that our fears were formed in a very different time, when the only entities with the resources to set up and administer surveillance cameras were cops and spooks. Now we throw our personal business out for the world to see, share, and comment upon. We’re watching everything, everyone. The fingers of the staunchest privacy activist itch for a money shot of the Man behaving badly.

Admit it or not, we love Big Brother.

A firm believer in the ongoing creation of the world through work, Jason Stackhouse puts his hands to any project in his path. He has worked up and down the East Coast as a locksmith, carpenter, plumber, electrician, security consultant, freelance writer, marketing strategist, research assistant, farmhand, lumberjack, and a counselor for developmentally disabled youth. In his spare time, he builds siege weapons.